The internet continues to expand as a source of information gathering and information distribution. Websites, computer desktops, and other computer applications that were once composed of static or fixed content, now provide live content to readers. Feeds can be incorporated into a user interface, either manually, by software, or through the use of online services, to provide relevant and up-to-date information, in the form of links, short textual excerpts, or a combination of both. Generally, a feed is created based on manual selection, a keyword search of content, constructed rules, or automated algorithms. The result is feed content consisting of a group of links, news headlines, podcasts, weblogs, etc.
A powerful feature of a feed is that it provides relevant data, such as news data, alongside the content created by the user. The feed generally represents current content. When new content is added to a feed, the old content is removed. Thus, the content consumer sees current information. Because of the ability to provide up-to-date information, feeds are typically incorporated into other content such as web sites, newsletters, weblogs, intranets, applications, kiosks, phones, set top boxes (i.e., cable television), Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds, syndicated feeds, etc. However, one significant limitation of a feed is that the content of the feed is determined in advance.
One attempt to overcome the limitation of predetermined feed content is contextualized advertising. In contextualized advertising, a website may decide to include feeds that provide advertisements to the website, usually in the form of banner ads, pop-ups, advertisement frames, etc. The contextualized advertisement feeds includes the ability to analyze the content of a website and provide an advertisement relevant to the content currently being supplied by the website.
For example, a website utilizing contextualized advertising feeds may publish an article on a recent sporting event. The contextualized feeds would analyze the article and determine, for example, that a relevant advertisement would be for an online sports apparel store. Thus, when the reader views the article about the sporting event, the website is also supplied with the relevant advertisement related to the content within the website.
A drawback to contextualized advertisements is the possibility of displaying an inappropriate or unwanted advertisement on a website. If a website publishes an article harshly criticizing a major airline, analysis of the content by a contextualized advertisement service may pick up on references to the airline in the article. According to the discussion above, a contextualized advertisement server might then insert an advertisement for that airline into the website. However, supplying an advertisement for the airline to a website criticizing the airline would neither be relevant and/or appropriate. The problem described above would be true for any server that is attempting to add contextualized advertisements to a user interface.
Another approach to providing relevant content to a website is described by Yahoo™ Y!Q. Yahoo's Y!Q search service provides a website the ability to embed contextualized search features within a web page. The service analyzes the content of a web page and provides results based on the content. One drawback to YQ is that it requires a website publisher to first select what content will be used for contextualization purposes and second encode the content as a search icon within the webpage. Further, a reader of the website must manually trigger the search to receive relevant content. Thus, the experience is not automatic and requires the reader to seek out the additional information.
Both methods described above suffer from a further limitation. The news feeds and search criteria are determined by a user or server in advance of a website being published or the feeds being added to a user interface. As such, the user does not retain control over the feeds or content that he or she receives. Therefore, what is needed is a method for supplying feeds that have been contextualized in real-time with context data creation based upon context data and/or preferences of a user.